Mumbai: Covid-19 cases in Maharashtra have again crossed 20,000-mark on Tuesday, with 20,141 new cases being reported, taking the total count to 9,43,772. The death toll has also increased to 27,407, with 380 fatalities reported in the last 24 hours. Till now 6,72,556 patients have recovered and discharged from various hospitals across the state, with 13,234 being recovered on Tuesday.
Of the new fatalities, 256 were from the past 48 hours, 94 from the past week, while the remaining 30 were from the period before it, the health department stated. The case fatality rate (CFR) of the state stood at 2.90%, much above the national rate of 1.72%, but less than Mumbai's 5%.
On Tuesday, Mumbai reported 1,346 new infections and 42 deaths, taking the city’s tally to 1,58,756, with 7,939 deaths so far. The recovery and mortality rate of Mumbai is stable for the last few days which is 79.30% and 5% respectively.
Dr Avinash Supe, former KEM dean and member of the expert committee appointed by the state to recommend steps to curb the spread, said the number is growing because of the aggressive testing in Mumbai and reset of the state. We should not be worried about the spike until the fatality rate is steady or decreasing. “If you see, in Mumbai, when there were 10,000 cases reported in a week in May, the deaths per week were 350, against about 200 a week now, when the cases have again increased to 10,000 a week. Elsewhere in Maharashtra, the number is rising, but it should be supplemented with aggressive tracking and isolation of the infected,” he said.
Dr Supe said that the rising number cannot be called a second wave.
“We will have to carefully study the pattern for a few days before coming to any such conclusion. I think the number of cases will keep rising till Diwali or early December. In Mumbai, if we could manage well, the number could come down below 1,000 cases a day in the next few days. In peripheral areas, weak infrastructure could be one of the reasons for the spike in cases,” he said.
So far, a total of 47.05 lakh tests have been conducted in the state, of which nearly 19.3 per cent were positive. There are 15.17 lakh, people, in-home quarantine and over 38,349 in institutional quarantine.
